Think about the way you read when you're online. You may have an ebook open on your iPad, plus your email, maybe a song playing on Spotify, and of course when you find a memorable line in the book, you might want to post it on Facebook. You may also want to check some facts on Wikipedia, as I recently did when reading Union Atlantic by Pultizer prize finalist Adam Haslett, a story about an investment banker. I decided it was about time that I found out what derivatives really were and took a break from the novel to watch a series of videos on complex economic jargon and the global banking system.

This hopping from screen to screen may be a growing problem. Scientists such as Dr Nicholas Carr and Dr Susan Greenfield warn us that smart technology is rewiring our neural pathways and that ADHD is on the rise, especially among the net-addicted younger generations. On the other hand, multi-screening might be a new and progressive way of reading across texts; a physical manifestation of the postmodern idea of "intertextuality". Whether you are for or against it, multi-screening is an unstoppable change in the way we consume ebooks. And it necessarily involves the collapse of a few forms that we have previously held as sacrosanct, not least the distinction between fact and fiction.

A score of new books and ebooks with mainstream publishers are "motivating young readers to find out more" by interactively mixing historical fact with first-person fictionalised accounts and embedded video. As these young readers are a vast and growing market, it doesn't take much imagination to predict that multi-screening will, in time, become the new norm – and that when that happens, it will spell the end for the barricaded integrity of forms such as the novel. But it's not as if we haven't been hearing alarm bells about precisely this throughout the 20th century. As Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) stated in his seminal essay "The Storyteller" [PDF] " … in fully developed capitalism, there emerges a form of communication … that confronts storytelling as no less of a stranger than did the novel, but in a more menacing way, and that it also brings about a crisis in the novel. This new form of communication is information." Multi-format, open access, internet wiki-learning is in the process of demolishing the walls that protect the novel, and this may not be a bad thing. Progressive writers over the last 30 years have long been pushing at the gates that the internet has now blown open.

Fact, fiction or faction?

Consider 1991's Generation X, by Douglas Coupland. In it you will find characters without a central plot who spend their time telling stories, living a meta-fiction about a culture they don't buy into; you will find factoids, office jargon sections and images detourned from ads and comics from the heyday of American consumerism.

And what is Zeitoun by Dave Eggers – a true story about the impact of Hurricane Katrina retold from interviews with one man who lived through it? Is it fiction or non-fiction? Re-imagined biography? What was A Million Little Pieces by James Frey? A scam fiction sold as a memoir? How true were any of the "facts" within it, and why did the revelation that much was invented create such a fuss, involving litigation and humiliation on the Oprah Winfrey Show? In his third "novel" Bright Shiny Morning, Frey pushes the form to the limit, inserting factual sections on everything from the construction of the LA road system to statistics on prostitution and gang violence. There is no way that such an expansive and insightful portrait of LA could have been created without these sections, taken from encyclopedias and new stories. Is it a novel? Increasingly this is an obsolete question.

Reality hunger

In his groundbreaking 2010 book/manifesto/extended essay Reality Hunger, David Shields perceived a growing obsolescence in the distinction between between "novels" and "non fiction", saying "I doubt very much that I am the only person who's finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels". He called for a new kind of writing embodying the contradictions of modern life, so that he could "play all the roles I want to play (reporter, fantasist, autobiographer, essayist, critic)"; a way to be a writer that seemed "true to how I am in the world". Shields advocated a new multi-format form: "the confusion between field report and self-portrait; the confusion between fiction and non-fiction …"

As Shields, and before him Milan Kundera and Walter Benjamin have pointed out, the novel has its roots historically in the retelling of anecdotes, and anecdotes are neither fact nor fiction. This can be traced from the sexual antics of persons in Boccaccio's Decameron in the 14th century, through the exotic fictionalised confessions of 18th-century French literature, to the amalgam of lived experience and fiction present in Henry Miller and Hunter S Thompson. Thompson's "Gonzo" journalism is a case in point.

Kundera, more than anyone, pushed the limits of the novel by including anecdotes and mini-essays within The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The reported, journalistic telling of the true tale of Stalin's son's suicide in the former novel has considerable impact on the entire book. It adds weight, because it is true; it also illuminates the crises that the protagonist goes through. It is a perfect fusion of fact and fiction, and it goes one step further, breaking up the novel into mixed genre sections – anecdote – history – philosophical essay.

When Michel Houllebecq cut and pasted sections from Wikipedia into his novel The Map Is Not the Territory, he was not only iconoclastically challenging the sanctity of the novel, but giving us a working model of the emerging internet multi-screen book.

We can see this hybrid of fact and fiction occurring in other forms: in cinema; in the films of Michael Winterbottom. Consider The Trip – a fiction/documentary based on biographical truth, with celebrity actors playing themselves but improvising their stories. It is also present in Lars Von Trier's Dogme manifesto, in which fiction must be recorded as documentary. And then of course there is celebrity reality TV.

To give this new form a name we could do worse than dusting down the term faction, which used to be used to describe 'real-life' TV dramatisations. As it seems to have a politics to itself and one that is rather hostile to established forms, this tag seems apt: "A faction of faction writers" (or perhaps readers could suggest another name).

From the time of the horse

We must catch ourselves in the act of thinking that the novel is somehow timeless and eternal, a Platonic form. Its history in fact only extends back a couple of hundred years. It is grounded in the physical and psychological realities of the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when people travelled by horse and carriage, lived in extended families and in which a trip of 100 miles could be an arduous adventure. People were tied to a place and a background, and the moral codes that came with it. Whether they were Dr Lydgate or Madame Bovary, their fate was tied to locality – if you transgressed everyone would know what you had done.

Compare that with our era, in which we have the option of anonymity. One of the problems we face these days is that many of our actions and comments exist only in the form of internet communication: they have no effect on anyone; they vanish into the digital void. How can the novel represent this? Does it have to contrive situations in which people are connected in old-fashioned ways in order to communicate the inherent ethic of the novel form? A case in point is the aforementioned Atlantic City. In the attempt to create a debate within the novel about the impact of global derivatives trading on the housing market, Haslett has to force connections between disparate people. He makes the woman fighting to save her home and garden the sister of the head of the Federal Reserve Bank, and her neighbour a hostile trader involved in a land grab. It's a laboured structural contrivance, built to spell out facts and politics. Haslett has regressed to the time of the horse and cart: the Head of the Fed, an evil trader and the woman who fights them live in the same village.

This problem of contriving characters to spell out a political truth is also present in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. In the novel, Franzen endlessly invents scenarios in which people can "talk" politics. His novel, as with Haslett's would have been better served by having structural breaks in which he laid out the politics in non-fictional format. But, a stalwart of the novel (and famously anti-internet: he has told of how he super-glued his Ethernet socket closed, so that he could write undisturbed) Franzen subjects us instead to lengthy passages in which characters explain specific political issues to the reader. Franzen's intention is to make his work more relevant; to create the Great American Novel which encompasses all life. But the form strains to bursting point at such an imposition. Freedom would have been a better book if it were half the size and had hyperlinks to the politics being discussed – or if Franzen had used his Ethernet socket.

Our modern world is, as sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman tell us, one of constant fragmentation and mixing of genres and lifestyles. The narratives of the traditional "life-story" are breaking down into unrelated pieces. We work 40 jobs over a lifetime, we have 50 sexual partners, we move location and we start again and again in the deregulated, privatised world of self-selling. We inhabit virtual places as much as we do real ones. Facts become blurred and we live out fictions. For works of writing to reflect this world, they also have to enter into the language and forms of our time, otherwise we end up with confused, over-stuffed, compromised books that use an old form to try to talk about a new time.

Whether we like it or not, the net is rewiring our reading habits. As Benjamin said, the novel, as it exists, cannot contain the threat from the form that is greater than it: information. If it is to be relevant at all, the novel must break into new hybrids and leave the 19th-century segregation of fact, fiction, memoir and essay behind. The novel must let the world in and speak through the many forms that the world already speaks through.

• Ewan Morrison's new book Tales from the Mall - a mixture of facts and fictions, images and videos is released on 10 April in paperback, enhanced ebook and app and is available for pre-order here.